Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Halloween Spooktacular 2008... The Prologue

At the offset of the upcoming festivities I wanted to provide to those of you who are either new here or have stumbled across this blog looking for "seasonal entertainment" an explanation of what I've got going on this month. For the third year in a row, I have prepared a Halloween mix containing 23 individual spooky themed Jamaican tunes from various eras complete with creepy sound effects, horror movie trailers and other obscure sound bytes. The mix is prepared as one seamless track and my goal is to provide a completely enjoyable and unique listening experience not just a bunch of songs thrown together haphazardly. I hope the "Spooktacular 2008" reaches that goal! Now here's the catch... once I got the entire 1 hour and 26 minute mix complete I chopped them back into individual tracks for you to download and enjoy throughout the month of October. If you download them all and put them together in order, either on your computer or MP3 player, it'll play like one uninterrupted mix. Honestly, I blog more for this then I do all year and it makes my life a little harder than it needs to be but, I have loved Halloween and horror movies forever and this project gives me the opportunity to combine that with my other passion which is obviously Jamaican music. By doing it this way I don't just throw up the mix on the 1st and be done until November, I have the opportunity to add a little anticipation on a daily basis as we countdown to the 31st.

Now you might be thinking, "A reggae Halloween mix? How is that possible?" The answer is relatively simple... there are a large amount of Jamaican tunes that go beyond the stereotypically perceived themes of reggae; peace, love and ganja smoke. There is also another reason I do this every year... I enjoy an odd juxtaposition. To add familiar sounding vintage American horror movie trailers to something so distinctly Jamaican, and for the most part unfamiliar to those who don't listen to this music on a regular basis, it creates an in-point and hopefully it can lead to developing an appreciation of a genre that is definitely not given the proper credit it is due. This is a vibrant, living, all-encompassing music and to typecast it as one dimensional, repetitive or inferior to any other artform is close-minded and ridiculous... okay I'll hop off my soapbox now. It was actually in response to that perception that inspired me to start this blog 4 years ago, right around the same time... I had spent a lot of time listening to and enjoying the wealth of obscure Halloween music outside the genre and took it upon myself to focus the attention to the equally scary subject matters coming from Jamaica.

In 2006, I came across the Scarstuff blog and was thoroughly inspired by 2 mixes that Jason had lovingly created in 2000 and 2001 called "Spook Party" and "Ghoul-Arama." Jason had used a multitude of Halloween related audio, either from his massive collection of vintage scary records and VHS movie clips and trailers, and gave a compilation of tunes a spectacular sound-bed that went way beyond what I had thought was actually do-able. I wanted to take this space to thank him for the inspiration and for sharing his Halloween record collection which makes this project so much fun to compile and mix! Thanks Jason!